In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, we
heard a great deal about "why they hate us" and why America is so
bad. In the meantime, we've endured lengthy lectures from
multicultural activists about America's history of slavery.
Leftists continue to fulminate about American foreign policy, which
they blame for most of the evils in the world. Cultural pessimists,
some of them conservative, deplore the materialism of American life
and the excesses and degradation of American culture. Clearly,
anti-Americanism doesn't just find support in cafes in Cairo,
Tehran, and Paris; it is also a home-grown phenomenon. In the view
of America's critics, both domestic and foreign, America can do no
right.

This indictment has the effect of undermining the patriotism of
Americans at a time when America's challenges in the world require
the enduring patriotic attachment of its citizens. America's
critics are aiming their assault on America's greatest weakness,
which is not military vulnerability but a lack of moral
self-confidence. Americans cannot effectively fight for their
country without believing that their country is good and that they
are fighting in a just cause. With Edmund Burke, Americans tend to
believe that "to make us love our country, our country ought to be
lovely."

Is America worthy of a reflective patriotism that doesn't
mindlessly assert, "My country, right or wrong," but rather
examines the criticisms of America and finds them wanting? As an
immigrant who has chosen to become an American citizen, I believe
that it is. Having studied the criticisms of America with care, my
conclusion is that the critics have a narrow and distorted
understanding of America. They exaggerate American faults, and they
ignore what is good and even great about America.

The immigrant is in a good position to evaluate American society
because he is able to apply a comparative perspective. Having grown
up in a different society-in my case, Mumbai, India-I am able to
identify aspects of America that are invisible to people who have
always lived here. As a "person of color," I am competent to
address such questions as what it is like to be a nonwhite person
in America, what this country owes its minority citizens, and
whether immigrants can expect to be granted full membership in this
society. While I take seriously the issues raised by the critics of
America, I have also developed an understanding of what makes
America great, and I have seen the greatness of America reflected
in my life. Unlike many of America's homegrown dissidents, I am
also acutely conscious of the daily blessings that I enjoy in
America.

Here, then, is my list of what makes America great.

America's Good Life

America provides an amazingly good life for the ordinary guy. Rich
people live well everywhere, but what distinguishes America is that
it provides a remarkably high standard of living for the "common
man." A country is not judged by how it treats its most affluent
citizens but by how it treats the average citizen.

In much of the world today, the average citizen has a very hard
life. In the Third World, people are struggling for their basic
existence. It is not that they don't work hard. On the contrary,
they labor incessantly and endure hardships that are almost
unimaginable to people in America. In the villages of Asia and
Africa, for example, a common sight is a farmer beating a pickaxe
into the ground, women wobbling under heavy loads, children
carrying stones. These people are performing arduous labor, but
they are getting nowhere. The best they can hope for is to survive
for another day. Their clothes are tattered, their teeth are
rotten, and disease and death constantly loom over the horizon. For
most poor people on the planet, life is characterized by squalor,
indignity, and brevity.

Even middle-class people in the underdeveloped world endure
hardships that make everyday life a strain. One problem is that the
basic infrastructure of the Third World is abysmal: The roads are
not properly paved, the water is not safe to drink, pollution in
the cities has reached hazardous levels, public transportation is
overcrowded and unreliable, and there is a two-year waiting period
to get a telephone. The poorly paid government officials are
inevitably corrupt, which means that you must pay bribes to get
things done. Most important, prospects for the children's future
are dim.

In America, the immigrant immediately recognizes that things are
different. The newcomer who sees America for the first time
typically experiences emotions that alternate between wonder and
delight. Here is a country where everything works: The roads are
clean and paper-smooth; the highway signs are clear and accurate;
the public toilets function properly; when you pick up the
telephone, you get a dial tone; you can even buy things from the
store and then take them back. For the Third World visitor, the
American supermarket is a thing to behold: endless aisles of every
imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, and multiple
flavors of ice cream. The place is full of countless unappreciated
inventions: quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, cordless
telephones, disposable diapers, roll-on luggage, deodorant. Some
countries, even today, lack these conveniences.

Critics of America complain about the scandal of persistent poverty
in a nation of plenty, but the immigrant cannot help noticing that
the United States is a country where the poor live comparatively
well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s when CBS television
broadcast "People Like Us," which was intended to show the miseries
of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also
broadcast the documentary, probably with a view to embarrassing the
Reagan Administration. But by the testimony of former Soviet
leaders, it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the
Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans have television sets
and microwave ovens and cars. They arrived at the same perception
of America as a friend of mine from Mumbai who has been trying
unsuccessfully to move to the United States for nearly a decade.
Finally, I asked him, "Why are you so eager to come to America?"
His reply: "Because I really want to move to a country where the
poor people are fat."

The moral triumph of America is that it has extended the benefits
of comfort and affluence, traditionally enjoyed by a very few, to a
large segment of society. Few people in America have to wonder
where their next meal is coming from. Emergency medical care is
available to everyone, even those without proper insurance. Every
child has access to an education, and many have the chance to go to
college.

Ordinary Americans enjoy not only security and dignity, but also
comforts that other societies reserve for the elite. We live in a
country where construction workers regularly pay $4 for a nonfat
latte, where maids drive rather nice cars, where plumbers and
postal workers take their families on vacation in Europe or the
Caribbean. As Irving Kristol once observed, there is virtually no
restaurant in America to which a CEO can go to lunch with the
absolute assurance that he will not find his secretary also dining
there. Given the standard of living of the ordinary American, it is
no wonder that socialist or revolutionary schemes have never found
a wide constituency in the United States. As sociologist Werner
Sombart observed, all socialist utopias have come to grief in
America on roast beef and apple pie.

As a result, people live longer, fuller lives in America. Although
at trade meetings around the world protesters rail against the
American version of technological capitalism, in reality, the
American system has given citizens a much longer life expectancy
and the means to live more intensely and actively. The average
American can expect to live long enough to play with his or her
grandchildren.

In 1900, the life expectancy in America was around 50 years; today,
it is more than 75 years. Advances in medicine and agriculture are
the main reasons. This increased life span is not merely a material
gain; it is also a moral gain because it means a few years of
leisure after a lifetime of work, more time to devote to a good
cause, and more occasions to do things with the grandchildren. In
many countries, people who are old seem to have nothing to do; they
just wait to die. In America, the old are incredibly vigorous, and
people in their seventies pursue the pleasures of life.

"Yes," the critics carp, "but these benefits are only available to
the rich." Not so. Indeed, America's system of technological
capitalism has over time extended the life span of both rich and
poor while narrowing the gap between the two. In 1900, for example,
the rich person lived to 60 while the poor person died at 45.
Today, the life expectancy of an affluent person in America is 78
years while that of the poor person is around 74. Thus, in one of
the most important indicators of human well-being, the rich have
advanced in America but the poor have advanced even more.

Equality

Critics of America allege that the history of the United States is
defined by a series of crimes-slavery, genocide-visited upon
African-Americans and American Indians. Even today, they say,
America is a racist society. The critics demand apologies for these
historical offenses and seek financial reparations for minorities
and African-Americans. But the truth is that America has gone
further than any society in establishing equality of rights.

Let's begin by asking whether the white man was guilty of genocide
against the native Indians. As a matter of fact, he was not. As
William McNeill documents in Plagues and Peoples, great numbers of
Indians did perish as a result of their contact with whites, but,
for the most part, they died by contracting diseases-smallpox,
measles, malaria, tuberculosis-for which they had not developed
immunities. This is tragedy on a grand scale, but it is not
genocide, which implies an intention to wipe out an entire
population. McNeill points out that, a few centuries earlier,
Europeans themselves contracted lethal diseases, including the
bubonic plague, from Mongol invaders from the Asian steppes. The
Europeans didn't have immunities, and the plague decimated
one-third of the population of Europe, and yet, despite the
magnitude of deaths and suffering, no one calls this
genocide.

So what about slavery? No one will deny that America practiced
slavery, but America was hardly unique in this respect. Indeed,
slavery is a universal institution that in some form has existed in
all cultures. In his study Slavery and Social Death, the West
Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, "Slavery has existed
from the dawn of human history, in the most primitive of human
societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth
that has not at some time harbored the institution." The Sumerians
and Babylonians practiced slavery, as did the ancient Egyptians.
The Chinese, the Indians, and the Arabs all had slaves. Slavery was
widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, and American Indians had slaves
long before Columbus came to the New World.

What is distinctively Western is not slavery but the movement to
end slavery. Abolition is a uniquely Western institution. The
historian J. M. Roberts writes, "No civilization once dependent on
slavery has ever been able to eradicate it, except the Western." Of
course, slaves in every society don't want to be slaves. The
history of slavery is full of incidents of runaways, slave revolts,
and so on. But typically, slaves were captured in warfare, and if
they got away, they were perfectly happy to take other people as
slaves.

Never in the history of the world, outside of the West, has a group
of people eligible to be slave owners mobilized against slavery.
This distinctive Western attitude is reflected by Abraham Lincoln:
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." Lincoln
doesn't want to be a slave-that's not surprising. But he doesn't
want to be a master either. He and many other people were willing
to expend considerable treasure, and ultimately blood, to get rid
of slavery not for themselves but for other people. The campaign to
end slavery was much harder in the United States than in Europe for
the simple reason that the practice of slavery had become so
entrenched in the American South.

The uniqueness of Western abolition is confirmed by the
little-known fact that African chiefs, who profited from the slave
trade, sent delegations to the West to protest the abolition of
slavery. And it is important to realize that the slaves were not in
a position to secure their own freedom. The descendants of African
slaves owe their freedom to the exertions of white strangers, not
to the people in Africa who betrayed and sold them.

Surely, all of this is relevant to the reparations debate. A
trenchant observation on the matter was offered years ago by
Muhammad Ali shortly after his defeat of George Foreman for the
heavyweight title. The fight was held in the African nation of
Zaire. Upon returning to the United States, a reporter asked Ali,
"Champ, what did you think of Africa?" Ali replied, "Thank God my
grand-daddy got on that boat!" There is a mischievous pungency to
Ali's remark, but behind it is an important truth. Ali is saying
that although slavery was oppressive for the people who lived under
it, their descendants are in many ways better off today. The reason
is that slavery proved to be the transmission belt that brought
Africans into the orbit of Western prosperity and freedom. Blacks
in America have a higher standard of living and more freedom than
any comparable group of blacks on the continent of Africa.

But what about racism? Racism continues to exist in America, but it
exists in a very different way than it did in the past. Previously,
racism was comprehensive or systematic; now it is more episodic. In
a recent debate with the Reverend Jesse Jackson at Stanford
University, I asked him to show me how racism today is potent
enough to prevent his children or mine from achieving the American
dream. "Where is that kind of racism?" I said. "Show it to me."
Jackson fired off a few of his famous rhyming sequences-"I may be
well-dressed, but I'm still oppressed," and so on-but conceded that
he could not meet my challenge. He noted that just because there
was no evidence of systematic racism, he could not conclude that it
did not exist. Rather, he insisted, racism has gone underground; it
is no longer overt but covert, and it continues to thwart African
Americans and other minorities from claiming their share of the
American dream.

In my view, this is complete nonsense. As a nonwhite immigrant, I
am grateful to the activists of the civil rights movement for their
efforts to open up doors that would otherwise have remained closed.
But at the same time, I am struck by the ease with which Martin
Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement won its victories,
and by the magnitude of white goodwill in this country. In a single
decade, from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, America radically
overhauled its laws through a series of landmark decisions: Brown
v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting
Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act. Through such measures, America
established equality of rights under the law. Of course, the need
to enforce nondiscrimination provisions continues, but for nearly
half a century, blacks and other minorities have enjoyed the same
legal rights as whites.

Actually, this is not strictly true. For a few decades now, blacks
and some minorities have enjoyed more rights and privileges than
whites. The reason is that America has implemented affirmative
action policies that give legal preference to minority groups in
university admissions, jobs, and government contracts. Such
policies remain controversial, but the point is that they reflect
the great lengths to which this country has gone to eradicate
discrimination. It is extremely unlikely that a racist society
would grant its minority citizens legal preferences over members of
the majority group. Some private discrimination continues to exist
in America, but the only form of discrimination that can be legally
practiced today benefits blacks more than whites.

The reality is that America has achieved greater social equality
than any other society. True, there are large inequalities of
income and wealth in America. In purely economic terms, Europe is
more egalitarian. But Americans are socially more equal than any
other people, and this is unaffected by economic disparities.
Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this egalitarianism a century and a
half ago, but it is, if anything, more prevalent today.

In other countries, if you are rich, you enjoy the pleasure of
aristocracy, which is the pleasure of being a superior person. In
India, for example, the rich enjoy the gratification of
subservience, of seeing innumerable servants and toadies grovel
before them and attend to their every need. In America, however, no
amount of money can buy you the same kind of superiority.

Consider, for example, Bill Gates. If Gates were to walk the
streets of America and stop people at random and say, "Here's a
$100 bill. I'll give it to you if you kiss both my feet," what
would the typical American response be? Even the homeless guy would
tell Gates to go to hell. The American view is that the rich guy
may have more money, but he isn't fundamentally better than anyone
else.

The American janitor or waiter sees himself as performing a
service, but he doesn't see himself as inferior to those he serves.
And neither do his customers see him that way: They are generally
happy to show him respect and appreciation on a plane of equality.
America is the only country in the world where we call the waiter
"Sir," as if he were a knight.

The Pursuit of Happiness

America offers more opportunity and social mobility than any other
country. In much of the world, even today, if your father is a
bricklayer, you become a bricklayer. Most societies offer limited
opportunities for and little chance of true social mobility. Even
in Europe, social mobility is relatively restricted. When you meet
a rich person, chances are that person comes from a wealthy family.
This is not to say that ordinary citizens cannot rise up and become
successful in France and Germany, but such cases are atypical. Much
more typical is the condescending attitude of the European "old
rich" toward the self-made person, who is viewed as a bit of a
vulgar interloper. In Europe, as in the rest of the world, the
preferred path to wealth is through inheritance.

Not so in America. Success stories of people who have risen up from
nothing are so common that they are unremarkable. Nobody bothers to
notice that in the same family, one brother is a gas station
attendant and the other is a vice president at Oracle. "Old money"
carries no prestige in America-it is as likely to mean that a
grandparent was a bootlegger or a robber baron. Rather, as the
best-selling book The Millionaire Next Door documents, more than 80
percent of American millionaires are self-made.

Indeed, America is the only country that has created a population
of "self-made tycoons." More than 50 percent of the Americans on
the Forbes 400 "rich list" got there through their own efforts.
Only in America could Pierre Omidyar, whose parents are Iranian and
who grew up in Paris, have started a company like eBay. Only in
America could Vinod Khosla, the son of an Indian army officer,
become a leading venture capitalist, a shaper of the technology
industry, and a billionaire to boot.

The critics complain that equal opportunity is a myth in America,
but there is more opportunity in this country than anywhere else in
the world. European countries may have better mass transit systems
and more comprehensive health care coverage, but nowhere does the
ordinary citizen have a better chance to climb up the ladder and to
achieve success than in the United States.

What this means is that in America, destiny is not given but
created. Not long ago I asked myself, what would my life have been
like if I had never come to the United States, if I had stayed in
India? Materially, my life has improved, but not in a fundamental
sense. I grew up in a middle-class family in Mumbai. My father was
a chemical engineer; my mother, an office secretary. I was raised
without great luxury, but neither did I lack for anything. My
standard of living in America is higher, but it is not a radical
difference. My life has changed far more dramatically in other
ways.

If I had remained in India, I would probably have lived most of my
life within a five-mile radius of where I was born. I would
undoubtedly have married a woman of my identical religious,
socioeconomic, and cultural background. I would almost certainly
have become a medical doctor, an engineer, or a software
programmer. I would have socialized within my ethnic community and
had cordial relations but few friends outside this group. I would
have had a whole set of opinions that could be predicted; indeed,
they would not have been very different from what my father
believed, or his father before him. In sum, my destiny would, to a
large degree, have been given to me.

Let me illustrate with the example of my sister in India who got
married several years ago. My parents began the process of planning
my sister's wedding by conducting a comprehensive survey of all the
eligible families in our neighborhood. First, they examined primary
criteria, such as religion, socioeconomic position, and educational
background. Then my parents investigated subtler issues: the social
reputation of the family, the character of the boy in question,
rumors of a lunatic uncle, and so on. Finally, my parents were down
to a dozen or so eligible families, and they were invited to our
home for dinner with suspicious regularity. My sister was, in the
words of Milton Friedman, "free to choose." My sister knew about,
and accepted, the arrangement: She is now happily married with two
children. I am not quarreling with the outcome, but clearly, my
sister's destiny was, to a considerable extent, choreographed by my
parents.

By coming to America, I have broken free from those traditional
confines. I came to Arizona as an exchange student, but a year
later, I was enrolled at Dartmouth College. There I fell in with a
group of students who were actively involved in politics; soon I
had switched my major from economics to English literature. My
reading included books like Plutarch's Moralia, The Federalist
Papers, and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; they transported
me to places a long way from home and implanted in my mind ideas
that I had never previously considered. By the time I graduated, I
had decided to become a writer, which is something you can do in
America but which is not easy to do in India.

After graduating from Dartmouth, I became managing editor of a
magazine and began writing freelance articles in newspapers.
Someone in the Reagan Administration was apparently impressed with
my work, because I was called in for an interview and hired as a
senior domestic policy analyst. I found it strange to be working at
the White House, because at the time I was not a United States
citizen. I am sure that such a thing would not happen in India or
anywhere else in the world. I also met my future wife during that
time. She was born in Louisiana and grew up in San Diego; her
ancestry is English, French, Scot-Irish, and German.

If there is a single phrase that encapsulates life in the Third
World, it is that birth is destiny. I remember an incident years
ago when my grandfather summoned my brother, my sister, and me and
asked us if we knew how lucky we were. Was it because we were
intelligent? Had lots of friends? Were blessed with a loving
family? Each time, he shook his head and said, "No." We pressed
him: Why did he consider us so lucky? And finally he revealed his
answer: "Because you are Brahmins."

The Brahmin is the highest ranking in the Hindu caste system and is
traditionally a member of the priestly class. Actually, my family
has had nothing to do with the priesthood. Nor are we Hindu: My
ancestors converted to Christianity many generations ago. Even so,
my grandfather's point was that before we converted, hundreds of
years ago, our family used to be Brahmins. How he knew this remains
a mystery, but he was insistent that nothing the three of us
achieved in life could possibly mean more than our being
Brahmins.

This may seem like an extreme example, only revealing my
grandfather to be a very narrow fellow indeed, but the broader
point is that traditional cultures attach a great deal of
importance to data such as what tribe you come from, whether you
are male or female, and whether you are the eldest son. Your fate
and your happiness hinge on these things. If you are Bengali, you
can count on other Bengalis to help you and on others to
discriminate against you. If you are female, then certain forms of
society and several professions are closed to you. And if you are
the eldest son, you inherit the family house, and your siblings are
expected to follow your direction. What this means is that once
your tribe, caste, sex, and family position have been established
at birth, your life takes a course that has been largely determined
for you.

In America, by contrast, you get to write your own script. When
American parents ask, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
the question is not merely rhetorical, for it is you who supplies
the answer. The parents offer advice or try to influence your
decision: "Have you considered law school?" "Why not become the
first doctor in the family?" It would be very improper, however,
for them to try to force their decision on you. Indeed, American
parents typically send their children away to college, where they
can live on their own and learn to be independent. This is part of
the process of developing your mind, deciding your field of
interest, and forming your identity. What to be, where to live,
whom to love, whom to marry, what to believe, what religion to
practice-these are decisions that Americans make for
themselves.

In America, your destiny is not prescribed; it is constructed. Your
life is like a blank sheet of paper, and you are the artist. The
freedom to be the architect of your own destiny is the force behind
America's worldwide appeal. Young people, especially, find the
prospect of authoring the narrative of their own lives
irresistible. So the immigrant, too, soon discovers that America
will permit him to break free of the constraints that had held him
captive while offering the future as a landscape of his own
choosing.

If there is a single phrase that captures this, it is the "pursuit
of happiness." Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul analyses it in this
way:

It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind
of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. So much is contained
in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life
of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and
achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a
fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to
exist; and because of that, other, more rigid, systems in the end
blow away.

The Ethics of Work

Capitalism gives America a this-worldly focus in which death and
the afterlife recede from everyday view. The gaze of the people is
shifted from heavenly aspirations to earthly progress. As such,
work and trade have always been important and respectable in
America. This "lowering of the sights" convinces many critics that
American capitalism is a base, degraded system and that the
energies that drive it are crass and immoral.

Historically, most cultures have despised the merchant and the
laborer, regarding the former as vile and corrupt and the latter as
degraded and vulgar. This attitude persists today in the Third
World, and it is even commonplace in Europe. Oscar Wilde spoke for
many Europeans when he commented that to have to scrub floors and
empty garbage cans is depressing enough; to take pride in such
things is absolutely appalling.

These modern critiques draw on some very old prejudices. In the
ancient world, labor was generally despised, and in some cases even
ambition was seen as reprehensible. Think about the lines from
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar
was ambitious." And here you might expect Mark Antony to say, "And
what's wrong with that?" But he goes on: "If it were so, it was a
grievous fault."

In the cultures of antiquity, Western as well as non-Western, the
merchant and the trader were viewed as low-life scum. The Greeks
looked down on their merchants, and the Spartans tried to stamp out
the profession altogether. "The gentleman understands what is
noble," Confucius writes in his Analects. "The small man
understands what is profitable." In the Indian caste system, the
vaisya or trader occupies nearly the lowest rung of the ladder-one
step up from the despised untouchable. The Muslim historian Ibn
Khaldun argues that gain by conquest is preferable to gain by trade
because conquest embodies the virtues of courage and manliness. In
these traditions, the honorable life is devoted to philosophy or
the priesthood or military valor. "Making a living" was considered
a necessary but undignified pursuit. As Khaldun would have it, far
better to rout your adversary, kill the men, enslave the women and
children, and make off with a bunch of loot than to improve your
lot by buying and selling stuff.

In America, it is different, and the American Founders are
responsible for the change. Drawing on the inspiration of modern
philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith, the American Founders
altered the moral hierarchy of the ancient world. They argued that
trade based on consent and mutual gain was preferable to plunder.
The Founders established a regime in which the self-interest of
entrepreneurs and workers would be directed toward serving the
wants and needs of others. In this view, the ordinary life, devoted
to production, serving the customer, and supporting a family, is a
noble and dignified endeavor. Hard work, once considered a curse,
now becomes socially acceptable, even honorable. Commerce, formerly
a degraded thing, becomes a virtue.

Of course, the Founders recognized that, in both the private and
the public spheres, greedy and ambitious people might pose a danger
to the well-being of others. Instead of trying to outlaw these
passions, the Founders attempted a different approach. As James
Madison put it in Federalist 51, "Ambition must be made to
counteract ambition." The argument is that in a free society, "the
security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious
rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of
interests, in the other in the multiplicity of sects." The framers
of the Constitution reasoned that by setting interests against each
other, by making them compete, no single one could become strong
enough to imperil the welfare of the whole.

In the public sphere, the Founders took special care to devise a
system that would prevent, or at least minimize, the abuse of
power. To this end, they established limited government in order
that the power of the state would remain confined. They divided
authority between the national and state governments. Within the
national framework, they provided for separation of powers so that
the legislature, executive, and judiciary would each have its own
domain of power. They insisted upon checks and balances, to enhance
accountability.

In general, the Founders adopted a "policy of supplying, by
opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives," as
Madison said. This is not to say that the Founders ignored the
importance of virtue, but they knew that virtue is not always in
abundant supply. The Greek philosophers held that virtue was the
same thing as knowledge-that people do bad things because they are
ignorant-but the American Founders did not agree. Their view was
closer to that of St. Paul: "The good that I would, I do not. The
evil that I would not, that I do." According to Christianity, the
problem of the bad person is that his will is corrupted, and this
is a fault endemic to human nature. The American Founders knew they
could not transform human nature, so they devised a system that
would thwart the schemes of the wicked and channel the energies of
flawed persons toward the public good.

Religious Liberty

America has found a solution to religious and ethnic conflict. In
many countries today, people from different faiths or tribes are
engaged in bloody conflict: Serbs and Croatians, Sikhs and Hindus,
Hindus and Muslims, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, Jews and
Palestinians, Hutu and Tutsi-the list of religious and ethnic
combatants goes on and on. Even in countries where ethnic or
religious differences do not lead to extreme violence, there is
generally no framework for people to coexist harmoniously. In
France and Germany, for example, nonwhite immigrants have proved
largely indigestible. They form an alien underclass within Europe,
and Europeans seem divided about whether to subjugate them or to
expel them. One option that is not available to the nonwhite
immigrants is to become full citizens. They cannot "become French"
or "become German" because being French and German is a function of
blood and birth. You become French by having French parents.

In America, things are different. Consider the example of New York
City. It is a tumultuous place, teeming with diversity. New York
has black and white, rich and poor, immigrant and native. I have
noticed two striking things about these people. They are energetic,
hard-working, opportunistic: They want to succeed and believe there
is a good chance they can. Second, for all their profound
differences, they manage somehow to get along. This raises a
question about New York and about America: How does it manage both
to reconcile such fantastic ethnic and religious and socioeconomic
diversity and give hope and inspiration to so many people from all
over the world?

The credit, I believe, goes largely to the American Founders. The
Founders were all too familiar with the history of the religious
wars in Europe, specifically their legacy of havoc and destruction.
They were determined to avoid that bloodshed in the New World. Not
that the Founders were anti-religion. On the contrary, they were
religious men (some Deist, some orthodox Christian) who insisted
that political legitimacy and rights derive from God. The
Declaration of Independence, for instance, insists that the source
of our rights is "our Creator." It is because rights come from God,
and not us, that they are "inalienable."

Despite the religious foundation for the American system of
government, the Founders were determined not to permit theological
differences to become the basis for political conflict. The
solution they came up with was as simple as it was unique:
separation of religion and government. This is not the same thing
as religious tolerance. Think about what tolerance means. If I
tolerate you, that implies I believe you are wrong: I object to
your views, but I will put up with you. England had enacted a
series of acts of religious toleration, but England also had an
official church. The American system went beyond toleration in
refusing to establish a national church and in recognizing that all
citizens, as a matter of right, were free to practice their
religion. As America's first President, George Washington, put it
in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island,
of August 1790:

It is now that tolerance is no more spoken of, as if it was by the
indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the
exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the
government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no
sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who
live under its protection should demean themselves as good
citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual
support.

One reason that separation of religion and government worked is
that colonial America was made up of numerous, mostly Protestant
sects. The Puritans dominated in Massachusetts; the Anglicans, in
Virginia; the Catholics were concentrated in Maryland; and so on.
No group was strong enough to subdue the others, and so it was in
every group's interest to "live and let live." The ingenuity of the
American solution is evident in Voltaire's remark that where there
is one religion, you have tyranny; where there are two, you have
civil conflict; but where they are many, you have freedom.

A second reason the American Founders were able to avoid religious
oppression and conflict is that they found a way to channel
people's energies away from theological quarrels and into
commercial activity. The American system is founded on property
rights and trade, and The Federalist tells us that the protection
of the unequal faculties of obtaining property is "the first object
of government." The logic of this position is best expressed by
Samuel Johnson's remark: "there are few ways in which a man is so
innocently occupied than in getting money." The Founders reasoned
that people who are working assiduously to better their condition,
people who are planning to make an addition to their kitchen and
who are saving up for a vacation, are not likely to go around
spearing their neighbors.

America has found a similar solution to the problem of racial and
ethnic division: Do not extend rights to ethnic groups, only to
individuals; in this way, all are equal in the eyes of the law,
opportunity is open to everyone who can take advantage of it, and
everybody who embraces the law and the American way of life can
"become American."

Of course, Americans have not always lived by these principles, and
there are exceptions, such as affirmative action. Such policies
remain controversial because, in a sense, they are un-American. In
general, however, America is the only country in the world that
extends full membership to outsiders. The typical American could go
to India and stay for 40 years, perhaps even taking Indian
citizenship, but he could not "become Indian." Indians would not
consider such a person Indian, nor would it be possible for him to
think of himself in that way. In America, by contrast, millions of
people come from all over the world, and over time most of them
come to think of themselves as Americans. Their experience suggests
that becoming Americans is less a function of birth or blood and
more a function of embracing a set of ideas and a way of
life.

Today in America, we see how the experiment that the Founders
embarked upon two centuries ago has turned out. In American cities
like New York, for example, tribal and religious battles, such as
we see in Lebanon, Mogadishu, Kashmir, and Belfast, are nowhere in
evidence. In Manhattan restaurants, white and African-American
secretaries have lunch together. In Silicon Valley, Americans of
Jewish and Palestinian descent collaborate on e-commerce solutions
and play racquetball after work. Hindus and Muslims, Serbs and
Croatians, Turks and Armenians all seem to have forgotten their
ancestral differences and joined the vast and varied parade of New
Yorkers. Everyone wants to "make it," to "get ahead," to "hit it
big." And even as they compete, people recognize that, somehow,
they are all in this together in pursuit of some great, elusive
American dream.

Ideals and Interests

America has the kindest, gentlest foreign policy of any
great power in world history. America's enemies are likely to
respond to this notion with sputtering outrage. Their view is that
America's influence has been, and continues to be, deeply
destructive and wicked. Many European, Islamic, and Third World
critics-as well as many American leftists-make the point that the
United States uses the comforting language of morality while
operating according to the ruthless norms of power politics. To
these critics, America talks about democracy and human rights while
supporting ruthless dictatorships around the world. In the 1980s,
for example, the U.S. supported Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, the
Shah of Iran, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Ferdinand Marcos in
the Philippines. Today, America is allied with unelected regimes in
the Muslim world such as Pervez Musharaff in Pakistan, Hosni
Mubarak in Egypt, and the royal family in Saudi Arabia. Moreover,
the critics charge that America's actions abroad, such as in the
Gulf War and Iraq, were not motivated by noble humanitarian ideals
but by the crass desire to guarantee American access to oil.

These charges contain an element of truth. In his book White House
Years, Henry Kissinger says that America has no permanent friends
or enemies, only interests. It is indeed true that American foreign
policy seeks to protect America's self-interest, but what is wrong
with this? All it means is that the American people have empowered
their government to act on their behalf against their adversaries.
They have not asked their government to remain neutral when their
interests and, say, the interests of the Ethiopians come in
conflict. It is unreasonable to ask a nation to ignore its own
interests, because that is tantamount to asking a nation to ignore
the welfare of its own people. Asked why he once supported the
Taliban regime and then joined the American effort to oust it,
General Musharaff of Pakistan coolly replied, "Because our national
interest has changed." When he said this, nobody thought to ask any
further questions.

Critics of U.S. foreign policy judge it by a standard applied to no
one else. They denounce America for protecting its self-interest
while expecting other countries to protect theirs. Americans need
not apologize for their country acting abroad in a way that is good
for them. Why should it act in any other way? Indeed, Americans can
feel immensely proud about how often their country has served them
well while simultaneously promoting noble ideals and the welfare of
others. So, yes, America did fight the Gulf War partly to protect
its access to oil, but also to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi invasion.
American interests did not taint American ideals; just the opposite
is true: The ideals dignified the interests.

But what about the United States backing Latin American, Asian, and
Middle Eastern dictators such as Somoza, Pinochet, Marcos, and the
Shah? It should be noted that, in each of these cases, the United
States eventually turned against these dictatorial regimes and
actively aided in its ouster. In Chile and the Philippines, the
outcomes were favorable: The Pinochet and Marcos regimes were
replaced by democratic governments that have so far endured. In
Nicaragua and Iran, however, one form of tyranny promptly gave way
to another. Somoza was replaced by the Sandinistas, who suspended
civil liberties and established a Marxist-style dictatorship, and
the Shah of Iran was replaced by a harsh theocracy presided over by
the Ayatollah Khomeini.

These outcomes help to highlight a crucial principle of foreign
policy: the principle of the lesser evil. It means that one should
not pursue a thing that seems good if it is likely to result in
something worse. A second implication of this doctrine is that one
is usually justified in allying with a bad guy in order to oppose a
regime that is even more terrible. The classic example of this was
in World War II. The United States allied with a very bad man,
Josef Stalin, in order to defeat someone who posed an even greater
threat at the time: Adolf Hitler. Once the principle of the lesser
evil is taken into account, many of America's alliances with
tin-pot dictators become defensible. America allied with these
regimes to win the Cold War. If one accepts what is today almost a
universal consensus-that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire"-then
the United States was right to attach more importance to the fact
that Marcos and Pinochet were reliably anti-Soviet than to the fact
that they were autocratic thugs.

None of this is to excuse the blunders and mistakes that have
characterized U.S. foreign policy over the decades. Unlike the old
colonial powers-the British and the French-the Americans seem to
have little aptitude for the nuances of international politics.
Part of the problem is America's astonishing ignorance of the rest
of the world. About this, the critics of the United States are
correct. They have also played a constructive role in exposing
America's misdoings. Here each person can develop his own list:
longstanding U.S. support for a Latin American despot, or the
unjust internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II, or
America's reluctance to impose sanctions on South Africa's
apartheid regime. There is ongoing debate over whether the United
States was right to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.

However one feels about these cases, let us concede to the critics
that America is not always in the right. What the critics
completely ignore, however, is the other side of the ledger. Twice
in the 20th century, the United States saved the world: first from
the Nazi threat, then from Soviet totalitarianism. After destroying
Germany and Japan in World War II, America proceeded to rebuild
both nations, and today they are close allies. Now the United
States is helping Afghanistan and Iraq on the path to political
stability and economic development. (What this tells us is that
North Vietnam's misfortune was to win the war against the United
States. If it had lost, it wouldn't be the impoverished country it
is now, because America would have helped to rebuild it and to
modernize it.)

Consider, too, how magnanimous the United States has been to the
former Soviet Union since the Cold War. And even though the United
States does not have a serious military rival in the world today,
it has not acted in the manner of regimes that have historically
occupied this enviable position. For the most part, America is an
abstaining superpower: it shows no interest in conquering and
subjugating the rest of the world. (Imagine how the Soviets would
have acted if they had won the Cold War.) On occasion, the U.S.
intervenes to overthrow a tyrannical regime or to halt massive
human rights abuses in another country, but it never stays to rule
that country. In Grenada and Haiti and Bosnia, the United States
got in and then got out.

Moreover, when America does get into a war, it is supremely careful
to avoid targeting civilians and to minimize collateral damage.
During the military campaign against the Taliban, U.S. Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld met with theologians to make sure that
America's actions were in strict conformity with "just war"
principles; and even as America bombed the Taliban's infrastructure
and hideouts, its planes dropped rations of food to avert hardship
and starvation on the part of Afghan civilians. What other country
does these things?

Jeane Kirkpatrick once said, "Americans need to face the truth
about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is." The reason that
many Americans don't feel this way is because they judge themselves
by a higher standard than anyone else. Americans are a
self-scrutinizing people: Even when they have acted well in a given
situation, they are always willing to examine whether they could
have acted better. At some subliminal level, everybody knows this.
Thus, if the Chinese, the Arabs, or the sub-Saharan Africans
slaughter 10,000 of their own people, the world utters a collective
sigh and resumes its normal business. We sadly expect the Chinese,
the Arabs, and the sub-Saharan Africans to do these things. By
contrast, if America, in the middle of a war, accidentally bombs a
school or a hospital and kills 200 civilians, there is an immediate
uproar followed by an investigation. What all this demonstrates, of
course, is the evident moral superiority of American foreign
policy.

America's Virtue

America, the freest nation on earth, is also the most virtuous
nation on earth. This point seems counterintuitive, given the
amount of conspicuous vulgarity, vice, and immorality in America.
Islamic critics of America, such as the Egyptian philosopher Sayyid
Qutb, argue that America has descended into what he terms
jahiliyya-a condition of social chaos, moral diversity, sexual
promiscuity, polytheism, unbelief, and idolatry that supposedly
characterized the Bedouin tribes before the advent of Islam.

Qutb attacks the American system at the roots. He insists that
American institutions are fundamentally atheistic; that is, they
are based on a clear rejection of divine authority. Qutb charges
that American democracy is based on the presumption that the
people, not God, should rule and that American capitalism is based
on the premise that the market, not God, determines worth. Both
democracy and capitalism are, in Qutb's view, forms of idol
worship.

Qutb's alternative to this is Islamic theocracy-a society in which
not only religious. but also economic, political, and civil rules
are based on the Koran and the Islamic "holy law." Islam doesn't
just regulate religious belief and practice; it covers such topics
as the administration of the state, the conduct of war, the making
of treaties, and the laws governing divorce and inheritance, as
well as property rights and contracts. The Islamic way is the best
way, according to Qutb, because it places human life in submission
to the infallible authority of God.

It is easy to dismiss Qutb as an ideologue or a religious
fanatic-he has been called "the brains behind Bin Laden"-but we
should examine his claims because behind the physical attacks of
the terrorists is also an intellectual attack. Qutb's views help us
to understand a powerful strand of radical Islam, and underlying
Qutb's accusations is a powerful claim. America, he argues, is
based on freedom, and freedom is often used badly. Islamic society,
he says, is based on virtue. It may be imperfect, but here in the
Islamic world, he claims, we are trying to implement the will of
God, and that makes us morally superior to the United States.

This argument cannot be rebuked by insisting, as many American
leaders and pundits have, that America is prosperous, America is
pluralistic, America extends rights to women, and so on. The
critics would concede all this but dismiss it as worthless trivia.
The point is that of course America does those things, but they are
not the most important things to do. The most important goal of a
society is to develop the virtue or character of its citizens. For
all its accomplishments, Qutb contends, America does not do that.
The case against America is that it is materially prosperous but
morally rotten.

The Islamic radicals' argument against America finds some
corroboration in the claims of some cultural conservatives who
worry that America used to be a good country but isn't one anymore.
This is the implication of Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah.
The rhetoric of some cultural conservatives seems to suggest that
Islamic critics of America have a point. "They are right about the
degradation of American culture," one cultural conservative sighed.
"If they agree to stop bombing our buildings in exchange for us
sending them Jerry Springer to do with as they like, we should
certainly make the trade."

If this were all there was to it, we should make the trade and
throw in some of Springer's guests, but Islamic radicals are not
just objecting to the excesses of American culture. They are
objecting to the core principle of America: the idea of the
self-directed life. The Islamic activists seek a society where the
life of the citizen is directed by others, whereas American is a
nation where the life of the citizen is largely
self-directed.

In a sense, the argument of the Islamic radicals is substantially
the same as the one made by Plato and other classical philosophers
who argued that the best regime is devoted to inculcating virtue.
Plato's point is that the ideal arrangement for a society is to
have the wisest citizens rule. No one can be against this,
especially in view of the alternative, which is rule of the unwise.
And in Plato's view, the wisest people are the philosophers.
Plato's case against democracy is that it mistakes quantity for
quality; it prefers the choices of the uninformed multitude to
those who really know what they are doing.

We have to concede that, in theory, Plato and the Islamic radicals
are on to something. Every society should seek to be ruled by its
best people; and to take the point further, who would make a better
and more just ruler than an omniscient God? Moreover, it would be
silly to insist that God issues laws or rules; better to let Him
decide each case on its merits. Nor is there any question of God
submitting to an election or popular referendum. Why should divine
wisdom, which is infallible, be subject to the consent of the
unwise?

But let us not be hasty in trying to implement these schemes. Even
as we concede in principle the validity of the doctrine articulated
by Plato, it cannot escape our notice that he has not given us a
portrait of an actual city. Rather, his is a "city in speech," a
utopia; even Plato does not expect to see it realized. There exist,
however, Islamic theocracies. The Taliban had one in Afghanistan,
and other Muslim countries, notably Iran, operate on the premise
that they are being ruled by Allah's decrees. But far from being
replicas of paradise on earth, these places seem to be
characterized by widespread misery, discontent, tyranny, and
inequality. Is God, then, such an incompetent ruler?

In reality, Iran is not ruled by God; it is ruled by politicians
and mullahs who claim to act on God's behalf. Right away, we see
the two problems with the Islamic radicals' doctrine. First,
Allah's teaching must be divined or interpreted by man, and this
raises the question of whether the revelation is authentic and the
interpretation accurate. Second, people inevitably disagree over
what Allah meant, or about how his edict applies in a given
situation, so there must be some human means of adjudicating the
conflict. In some cases, people may even reject Allah, preferring
the wisdom of the Christian God or of their own minds. What is to
be done with them?

Islam's solution-like that of medieval Christianity-is one of
compelling the dissidents and the nonbelievers to conform to
religious authority, which is enforced by the ruling powers.
Through an elaborate system of Koranic law, precedent, and
tradition, Islamic societies seek to apply divine wisdom to a
multitude of situations. Since no law, however detailed, can
anticipate every human circumstance, in practice this approach
places divine authority at the discretion of mullahs and other
authorities who can use it to have people fined, jailed, flogged,
dismembered, or killed. Such sentences are quite common in Islamic
societies. As for religious dissenters and nonbelievers, Islamic
societies have traditionally dealt with them with predictable
severity. Islamic rulers required Christians and Jews to pay a
special tax and agree to a whole set of religious and social
restrictions that effectively made them second-class citizens. As
for atheists, polytheists, and apostates, Islamic rulers gave them
a simple choice: Accept Allah or be killed.

The American Founders were strongly opposed to these harsh
"solutions"; indeed, they did not consider them to be solutions at
all. In the Founders' view, there is no reason to assume that the
rulers of a society will be any less self-interested or any more
virtuous than the people. On the contrary, they are the ones who
are most susceptible to being corrupted because power carries with
it the temptation to abuse. Therefore, the American Founders
emphasized not the regulation of public virtue but the limiting of
the power of the rulers.

How did they do this? The Founders took special care to devise a
system that would prevent, or at least minimize, the abuse of
power. To this end, they established limited government in order
that the power of the state would remain confined. They divided
authority between the national and state governments. Within the
national framework, they provided for separation of powers so that
the legislature, executive, and judiciary would each have its own
domain of power. They insisted upon checks and balances to enhance
accountability. In general, the Founders sought to limit the abuse
of power by adopting a "policy of supplying, by opposite and rival
interests, the defect of better motives."

Perhaps the Founders can be credited with effectively checking the
power of rulers, but what of Sayyid Qutb and the Islamic radicals'
contention that the American regime is indifferent to the virtue of
its citizens? I wish to conclude by suggesting that this is the
point on which the Islamic radicals are most decisively wrong. Not
only is the American system conducive to producing more virtue than
the Islamic regimes favored by the radicals, but virtue exists only
in the kind of free society that we find in America. In theocratic
and authoritarian societies, virtue is largely absent.

Let us concede at the outset that, in a free society, freedom will
frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes freedom
to do good or do evil, to act nobly or basely. Thus, we should not
be surprised that there is a considerable amount of vice,
licentiousness, and vulgarity in a free society. Given the warped
timber of humanity, freedom is simply an expression of human flaws
and weaknesses. The American Founders knew this.

But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out
the best. The millions of Americans who live decent, praiseworthy
lives deserve our highest admiration because they have opted for
the good when the good is not the only available option. Even amid
the temptations that a rich and free society offers, they have
remained on the straight path. Their virtue has special luster
because it is freely chosen. The free society does not guarantee
virtue any more than it guarantees happiness. But it allows for the
pursuit of both, a pursuit rendered all the more meaningful and
profound because success is not guaranteed; it has to be won
through personal striving.

By contrast, the externally directed life that Islamic
fundamentalists seek undermines the possibility of virtue. If the
supply of virtue is insufficient in self-directed societies, it is
almost nonexistent in externally directed societies because coerced
virtues are not virtues at all. Consider the woman who is required
to wear a veil. There is no modesty in this, because the woman is
being compelled.

Compulsion cannot produce virtue; it can only produce the outward
semblance of virtue. And once the reins of coercion are released,
as they were for the terrorists who lived in the United States, the
worst impulses of human nature break loose. Sure enough, the deeply
religious terrorists spent their last days in gambling dens, bars,
and strip clubs, sampling the licentious lifestyle they were about
to strike out against. In this respect, they were like the
Spartans, who-Plutarch tells us-were abstemious in public but
privately coveted wealth and luxury. In externally directed
societies such as Iran, the absence of freedom signals the absence
of virtue. Thus, the free society is not simply richer, more
varied, and more fun: It is also morally superior to the externally
directed society.

My conclusion is that America is the greatest, freest, and most
decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert
of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique
in the world, is now the last best hope for the world. By making
sacrifices for America and by our willingness to die for her, we
bind ourselves by invisible cords to those great patriots who
fought at Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima, and we prove
ourselves worthy of the blessings of freedom. By defeating the
terrorist threat posed by Islamic radicalism, we can protect the
American way of life while once again redeeming humanity from a
global menace. History will view America as a great gift to the
world, a gift that Americans today must preserve and cherish.

Dinesh D'Souzais the Robert and Karen Rishwain
Scholar at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of the New York
Times best-seller What's So Great About America. His other books
include Illiberal Education, The End of Racism, Ronald Reagan: How
an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, The Virtue of
Prosperity, and Letters to a Young Conservative